We did a program this month at the Cincinnati Art Museum with the Cincinnati Bar Association on Painting a More Perfect Union: the Constitution Through the Lens of Visual Arts Masterpieces. Grant Wood’s American Gothic is at the CAM on loan from the Art Institute of Chicago. While one of the most parodied works in American art, Grant Wood’s ...
A recent appearance before the Ohio Supreme Court occasioned seeing this and other artwork at The Thomas J. Moyer Ohio Judicial Center. Among the many murals is this work by Herman Henry Wessel (1878-1969) entitled "Twentieth Century Commerce in Ohio". The Wessel studio where he and his painter wife Bessie worked is near Eden Park in Cincinnati. I ...
A full house of judges and lawyers attended our keynote address yesterday at the Columbus Bench and Bar Conference. The purpose of bench and bar conferences is to improve professionalism and the effective administration of judicial process. Judges and lawyers, in an informal and interactive setting speak and listen to ways we can improve our ...
The American Bar Association's section of Labor and Employment Law published an article I authored in the Spring 2014 newsletter. The article, Works of Art on the Art of Work, discusses the Cincinnati murals created by Winold Reiss (1886-1953). The murals, originated during the Great Depression, celebrated the workers and ...
On the sixtieth anniversary (this month) of the most important decision of the Supreme Court in 20th century legal history, there are three things about Brown vs. Board of Education that strike a note: its brevity, its unanimity and its tone. Brown contrasts with today’s Supreme Court decisions which are often lengthy, divided ...
A youngster looks up at a gigantic glass sculpture by Dale Chihuly and says: “Wow, how did he DO THAT!?” The sculpture is an installation of blown glass, glowing with color, suspended in space, enormous in scale but as delicate as a living sea creature. The young question is one of the highest compliments a viewer of any age can pay a work of art ...
The Supreme Court ruled (5-4) this week in Greece v. Galloway that the Upstate New York town of Greece’s practice of opening its town board meetings with a prayer (given by clergy selected from a local directory) does not violate the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. Certain facts limit the Court’s ruling: the prayer was ...
So ask yourself. What ideas or insights are you more likely to believe: those that someone tells you you should or must believe, or those that you discover yourself? Once we reach the age of reason, most of us prefer to make up our own minds and discover for ourselves. So the trial lawyer knows that the advocate’s role is to lead the jury to discover ...
In the art of legal persuasion, how the issue is framed often determines how it is decided. And sometimes the issue itself is who decides or (as once presidentially put) who’s “the decider”.
The Supreme Court was the decider on April 22 when it held that the voters of the States may decide whether to prohibit affirmative action in state ...